Q&A with Spencer Quinn (and Chet the Jet)

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Spencer’s Quinn’s 7th mystery in the Chet & Bernie Mystery Series hits bookshelves on 8/5. Here, Spencer answers a few questions about his writing process, the series, dogs in entertainment and more. Plus, we get a little time with the star of the series, Chet the Jet!

So, Spencer:

What was the initial inspiration for the series?

My wife said, “You should do something about dogs.” That very day I wrote the first page of Dog On It. We took a vote and by a count of 2-0 we decided it was working.

Do you tend to watch dogs and other animals more closely now to mine them for good Chet behavior?

Curse and blessing, but I’ve always been a close watcher, period. I don’t dial it up in order to be productive – it’s just sort of there. That said, I’m a dog lover and of course you pay attention to what you care about.

What’s your favorite part of interacting with your fans?

The online community that’s arisen around the Chet and Bernie series on Facebook and at www.ChettheDog.com is wonderful. We’ve got dog lovers, mystery lovers, and story lovers in general. But my favorite part is the question period after I give a talk. Imaginations connect!

You write so naturally as Chet. Is it hard for you to get into the “dog” mentality?

If it was hard I wouldn’t do it. Slipping into the dog mentality seems to come easily to me. Maybe there’s been a DNA mixup somewhere, of the benign kind.

What other authors have inspired your writing?

I admire the work of many writers, including Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Ross Macdonald and P.G. Wodehouse. Beyond everything else, they were all great plotters. That takes hard effort for anybody, which is maybe why plot is often a neglected element.

What can humans learn from dogs?

That’s a huge subject, and a main theme of the Chet and Bernie series. Boiling it down, it’s about an attitude toward life: in the now, optimistic, physical, loving. And not overthinking things.

OK then, Chet:

Cats: take them or leave them?

I don’t have the slightest problem with cats, unless one escapes up a tree, or yawns in my face, or lounges on a couch in that annoying I’m-better-than-you-are way, or otherwise crosses my path.

Do you prefer car rides or walks?

That’s like asking what’s better, Slim Jims or steak tips? I prefer them both.

Are clues best dug up or sniffed out?

Sniffing is huge in my business – I’m a partner in the Little Detective Agency, in case that needs mentioning.

Sniffable clues are in the air just about all the time when it comes to humans, perps or not. The things I’ve learned from sniffing people! Don’t get me started. Digging is more of a specialized thing, important sometimes – take that Greyhound bus I once dug up, and what was with that name, anyway? – but on lots of cases I don’t dig at all, except for my own pleasure.

Spencer Quinn is the author of six previous Chet and Bernie mystery novels: Dog on It, Thereby Hangs a Tail, To Fetch a Thief, The Dog Who Knew Too Much, A Fistful of Collars, and The Sound and the Furry.  He lives on Cape Cod with his dogs Audrey and Pearl.  When not keeping them out of mischief, he is hard at work on the next Chet and Bernie mystery.  Keep up with him–and with Chet and Bernie–by visiting ChetTheDog.com or Facebook.com/ChetTheDog.

The Secret to Making Love Last By Marissa Stapley

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A few summers ago, while out for a canoe ride with my mom at the same cottage that inspired part of the setting of my debut novel, Mating for Life, my mom said something to me that I have never forgotten. I had just had an argument with my husband that morning. The fight was nothing too major: our kids were quite young at the time; we were often tired; I know I sometimes got resentful of the fact that he seemed to be able to sleep through any and all night-wakings while I, even on vacation, ended up bleary eyed and tired in the mornings, groping blindly for coffee and fantasizing about napping.

But still, this resentment was worrying me. Even back then, even before I had written a novel like Mating for Life – which shines a spotlight on the ins and outs of relationships, as well as the sometimes harsh reality of bonds that are meant to last for life – I recognized resentment as the enemy of love. A recently divorced friend had told me he was sure resentment (of late nights working, of interrupted sleep because of young children, of household chores unfairly distributed, of guy’s golf weekends or girl’s spa weekends, of anything, really) was what spelled the beginning of the end of his marriage. As I confided in my mom about the unrest between my husband and me that morning, I told her that I resented him – and that it scared me. I said, “I always envisioned us staying together forever but … What if it doesn’t work out? I’m sure you thought you’d stay with dad when you married him, but you two ended up breaking up. What if that’s my destiny, too?”

She stopped paddling and our canoe glided across the still water. And she said to me, “The difference is that the two of you work on your relationship a lot harder than your father and I did. We just gave up. Probably before we needed to.”

She went on to explain the difference in our generations: that my dad and her – who are still close friends, even after divorcing – were a lot younger when they married than most couples are today. That their parents were of a generation that, generally, did not get divorces, and that, in some ways, the idea of being able to dissolve a marriage was seen as a new type of freedom, a result of the liberation of the ‘60s. Except, she said, no one realized quite how painful it was all going to be. And also, no one considered the fact that trading one relationship for another wasn’t going to solve the challenges that long-term relationships posed. What many people learned was that making a relationship, any relationship, last forever was hard work, no matter who you ended up with in the end. (And sometimes, you didn’t end up with anyone. Sometimes, you ended up counting on your friends or your family, instead of a spouse.)

My husband and I made up, of course. And over the course of the next few years, I began to resent the amount of work our relationship required less and less. I looked around and noticed that our friends were working at their relationships, too, and that those who were heading for divorce court were doing so only after much counselling and deliberation. I started to create the characters in Mating for Life, characters whose tales were very much about the realities of long term love in all its forms, and characters who were connected to each other in profound ways, just as I believe we all are. My novel certainly does not present a rose-coloured view of any type of relationship, but I do think it presents an honest look – and sometimes, being honest about our relationships is one of the most important ways to sustain them.

As I mentioned, my parents are still friends. They “consciously uncoupled” long before Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin made it fashionable to do so. Ultimately, they’re still in a lifelong relationship of sorts, as co-parents of my brother and I and as friends with each other. Perhaps my mom is right, and they could have tried harder—or perhaps they just weren’t meant to be married. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living my life and writing a book like Mating for Life it’s that love is rarely simple, and that loving anyone – spouse, sibling, parent, child, friend – can present some of the most significant challenges in life. But love can also present the greatest rewards.

So what’s the secret to making love last? Sisters Ilsa and Liane have a very important conversation in Mating for Life that I think reveals this very thing:

“Here’s the thing about love. It can last, but you have to be careful with it. You have to treat it like it’s your most precious possession, you have to never, ever take it, or the person you love, for granted. Even just doing it once could spell the beginning of the end. Resentment, it’s love’s worst enemy. Don’t forget that, Liane, okay? Don’t forget that, and you’ll be fine.”

This is an excerpt from the book that has been quoted by many fans and reviewers. But I’ve always thought this second part of the conversation is important, too—the part about the what if? (What if it doesn’t work out? What if this relationship isn’t my destiny?)

“And also, don’t be afraid. Helen said something to me once about the pain of love leaving behind a beautiful memory. Even if something doesn’t work, maybe you don’t have to let it scar you. Maybe it can be something other than a scar, something that makes you stronger.”

Our relationships sustain us. They’re important. We should always try our hardest at them. But we will not always succeed. That’s just reality – and, as the characters in Mating for Life learn, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

 

Bio

Marissa Stapley is a writer and former magazine editor who contributes to Elle, The Globe and Mail and The National Post, among others.  She also teaches writing at the University of Toronto and editing at Centennial College.  She lives in Toronto with her husband and two young children–and she has the same birthday L.M. Montgomery.

Behind the Scenes: Return to Love featuring Kathleen Shoop

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Return to Love is romance novel that I never thought I would write. Why? Because eighteen months ago was the first time I’d written a word of sweet, romantic fiction in my life. Yes, I’d written about love in award-winning historical and women’s fiction, but it wasn’t until I was invited to contribute a novella to an anthology called, Bliss, that it occurred to me that I could write romance, that I even wanted to. And boy, have I fallen in love with it.
 
Bliss is a collection of stories that are all set in the same house on the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, but each story is set in a different era. How fun is that? Well, I was one of the last to choose my era and the 1960’s was one time period available. I narrowed my setting down to 1969 and I could not be more thrilled with what I found in researching that era! My novella in the collection is called Home Again and from that story, came two characters who I could not stop thinking about. April and Hale Abercrombie—two lost souls who find love together.
 
Return to Love is a novel, book two in the April and Hale series, and it takes the reader further into their relationship—a journey filled with sweet moments, passion, and humor. Still, knowing that a great romance holds the couple at its center, didn’t keep me from formulating a world around them that went beyond the well-worn stereotypes of the time (or at least I hope so!).
 
Some struggles of the Vietnam War era are well known and I do draw from them in making Hale a navy pilot. Hopefully he comes across as a fully developed, layered man and not just a hanger holding up a uniform. Likewise when I created April, I wanted to go beyond the well-known archetypes of the time. I wanted her to embody elements of women who were experimenting with freedom and control over their livelihoods, but as I researched I found that was not always a straight path from daddy’s little girl to independent woman breaking glass ceilings. I wanted her to embody the struggle between the two, the struggle that is less often portrayed—a woman with all the advantages, skill, education and desire for a career who is not sure how that will fit with her personal goals.
 
In Return to Love, April must deal with the loss of a late-term pregnancy. Hale must return to her in order to help her through it. Again, this area of research was fascinating and compelling. The push and pull between a couple caught in the distance and stress that war creates is material rife with passion. But again, there is humor. If nothing else, it is clear that the most resilient people in life are those who find pockets of laughter in grief, in worry, and from this ability to see absurdity in sorrow, there is hope.
 
It’s my hope that readers love April and Hale as much as I do and find their story heartwarming and satisfying. They are unique fun characters who led me to learn a lot about life at a time that found love and peace to be the motto by which it was defined.

Amazon Top-100 Bestselling author, Kathleen Shoop, holds a PhD in reading education and has more than 20 years of experience in the classroom. She writes historical fiction, women’s fiction and romance. Shoop’s novels have garnered various awards in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, Eric Hoffer Book Awards, Indie Excellence Awards, Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the San Francisco Book Festival. Kathleen has been featured in USA Today and the Writer’s Guide to 2013. Her work has appeared in The Tribune-Review, four Chicken Soup for the Soul books and Pittsburgh Parent magazine. She lives in Oakmont, Pennsylvania with her husband and two children.

April and Hale Abercrombie’s love is tender and sweet. While he serves in Vietnam, their marriage is marked by trust and the belief that they will grow old together with a gaggle of grandchildren at their feet. But, their charmed marriage changes in the face of losing their newborn daughter.

On leave from his tour, Hale can barely wait to hold his wife and her help her heal. When he arrives, his embrace, his touch, and his love are as perfect as April remembered. Their reunion is passionate and their physical connection is strong and soothing. But, April’s heartache remains.

Hale stumbles through his attempts to prove to April that their future will be rich and full of wonder. His good-hearted, but take-charge approach causes her to retreat. Even in grief, April can see Hale’s earnestness, yet she finds solace in putting space between them. With a short time before Hale must return to war will they see that real love endures in the face of adversity, that their marriage can be strengthened even when it looks as though all is lost?

Set on the beaches of the Outer Banks, Return to Love is the second book in the Endless Love series. Book one, Home Again, was named a finalist in the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. 

 

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My Top Ten Lovy Story Movies by Lisa Burstein

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I am a sucker for a good love story, especially in movie form. So I thought I would share, my top ten Love Story Movies in no particular order. You may notice they are hot guy heavy ;).

  1. Sixteen Candles- Jake Ryan and a birthday cake, need I say more.
  2. Harold and Maude- A Cat Stevens musical score and an ending that makes you cry.
  3. Love, Actually- So many love stories packed into one movie and of course Colin Firth.
  4. Bridget Jones' Diary- You so want Bridget to get with the right guy, who is of course Colin Firth.
  5. The Breakfast Club- Judd Nelson I'll give you one of my diamond earrings any day.
  6. Annie Hall- Love is hard and funny and Diane Keaton wears a mean tie.
  7. Crazy, Stupid, Love- One of the best modern movies on the subject of love and of course Ryan Gosling.
  8. Some Kind of Wonderful- The best friends to more than friends movie of the 80's.
  9. Pretty Woman- Billionaire Richard Gere on a fire-escape with flowers- swoon!
  10. Romeo and Juliet(The one with Leo DiCaprio)- Leo and Claire Daines- perfection.

Lisa Burstein is a tea seller by day and a writer by night. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University. She is the author of Pretty Amy, The Next Forever, Dear Cassie and Sneaking Candy. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her very patient husband, a neurotic dog and two cats.

 

One weekend together could change everything…

When her friend called to tell her about the funeral, Cassie wanted to say no. She had enough to handle with her own hollow existence. But she knew she should pay her respects to her old camp counselor…as long as her ex, Ben, wouldn’t be there.

Except Ben is there. Still gorgeous, still angry, and still able to penetrate her defenses with one intense stare. All the reasons they left each other in a flurry of heartache start to fall away over one long, snowy weekend.

But tough Cassie can’t truly open up to Ben when she knows confessing her secrets will leave her raw, defenseless. And the possibility of forever might not be enough to gamble on all the impossibilities of now.

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How music helped the characters in MATING FOR LIFE become real featuring Author Marissa Stapley

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There’s something about the characters in Mating for Life—sisters Fiona, Ilsa and Liane, their mother, Helen, and the women surrounding them—that feel very real to me. I’m aware that I made them up, that I created them in my mind and then gave them life on the page only. And yet, somehow, I feel like I see them everywhere. I’ve had to stop myself from approaching women on the street and saying crazy things like, “Ilsa?! It’s you! I knew we’d meet in person one day!” or “Liane! Hi! Want to grab a coffee?”

I think part of what has made these characters so real is that they came from a very authentic place inside me. I started writing Mating for Life when I had reached a point in my life where I believed everything was supposed to come together. Husband? Check. Two kids? Check. House? Check. Perfect life? … Not exactly. The truth is that no matter what point we’re at in our lives, we all have our challenges, we all have our instincts to fight or embrace, and we’re all trying to write ourselves a happy ending—but learning in the process that this is anything but a simple task.

As I wrote about these women that I identified with so strongly—Liane, with her rose-colored perception of love tempered by harsh reality; Ilsa, struggling to align her bohemian, pre-child self with the person she feels she’s supposed to be; Fiona, with her fierce devotion to her family and the impossible standards she’s set for herself; and Helen, who, even in her sixties, isn’t quite sure who she is—the music I listened to helped set the mood for every writing session. I got to know my characters through these songs. (Think about your best friend in the world: you probably know what her favorite song is, right? Or maybe there’s a certain song that makes you think of your mom, or sister, or favorite aunt. It’s the same with these women and me.)

Eventually, I created playlists for each character (Liane’s a bit of a hipster-folkie, Ilsa listens to a lot of Tori Amos, Fiona has a grudging appreciation for Joni Mitchell that she inherited from her mother, and Helen divides her time between Bob Dylan, Melanie, and Jefferson Airplane) and I’m sharing some of these songs with you now. This music helped bring the characters in my novel to life, and I hope you’ll feel the same as you listen and read.

Have a listen to the Playlist 

Marissa Stapley is a writer and former magazine editor who contributes to Elle, The Globe and Mail and The National Post, among others.  She also teaches writing at the University of Toronto and editing at Centennial College.  She lives in Toronto with her husband and two young children–and she has the same birthday L.M. Montgomery.

10 Tips for Becoming a Better Writer by Maggie Thom

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There are so many different types and styles of writing and people do it for many reasons. No matter what you are writing or why you are writing though there are ways to become a better writer.

1. Be willing to edit and rewrite and edit and rewrite. Do not expect the first draft to be the final draft. Good writing takes practice and lots of rewrites.

2. Get feedback on your writing - share it with other writers and with other readers.

3. Know that when someone is giving you feedback (whether nicely or not), it is only their opinion, do not take it personally. Take what you can from their feedback to learn from it and let the rest go.

4. Take some writing courses, there is always something to be learned from them.

5. Read a lot, not only in what you are writing but other styles and other genres. Figure out what you like and don't like.

6. When you read something that really grabs your attention, analyze it. What made it so good?

7. Experiment with your writing - try a different style, write in a different tense, write about something you normally wouldn't - it can show you many different aspects to your writing. Be adventurous.
8. If one writing project is keeping you stuck, switch up what you're writing. Go write something else and come back to that piece at a later time.

9. Practice - write, write, write... it sounds easy but it really is about taking time to sit down and just write about anything.

10. At some point you need to take the leap and put yourself out there. No matter what you write there is an audience waiting to read it and it will be your greatest learning.

Writing is an adventure that is meant to be enjoyed not endured. Happy Writing.

Award winning author, Maggie Thom, took the challenge and leapt off, leaving a fulltime, twenty year career in management, to write full time. After publishing her first suspense/thriller book Captured Lies, October 2012, she published her second novel, Tainted Waters, April, 2013. Tainted Waters went on to win 2013 Suspense and Thriller Book of the Year through Turning the Pages Magazine and Captured Lies won book of the Month through LAS Reviews (February 2014). She published her third novel, Deceitful Truths (The Caspian Wine Series - Book 2), March 2014. An avid reader and writer her whole life, she decided to break the monotony of wishing to be an author by making it happen. She is a wholehearted nature lover and likes nothing better than to take a book, hike to a remote spot by a river or waterfalls and read. Married to her best friend, she is learning that humor, love and patience help her navigate her way through her twins’ teen years.

He didn’t commit suicide but who’s going to believe her...

Frustrated at being fired from her latest job and overwhelmed by her consolatory family, Sam decides to move to the family’s cabin at the lake. A place she hasn’t been since her dad committed suicide there, twenty years before. Or did he? Snooping is something she’s good at but someone seems to be taking offense to her looking too closely at what has been happening at the lake. What she discovers is shocking. Now she must uncover what’s real and what’s not. All that she learned growing up, may be false.

Keegan, who has recently moved to the area to finish his latest book, is also trying to find out if his grandfather, who’d passed away ten years before, died of natural causes or was murdered? The descendants of the four families, who own the land around the lagoon, are dying off.

Since Sam and Keegan are the only ones questioning the deaths, they find themselves working together to seek the truth. Are people being murdered? Who would benefit from their deaths? Why would there be barricades and armed guards at the north end of the lake? To stay alive, Sam and Keegan must find the answers and convince others, before more people are killed... including them.